Backend Staff Engineer

Backend Staff Engineer – Help us build the next generation of Priva solutions

About Priva | Your Future Ecosystem

Located between Rotterdam and The Hague, in the heart of the world’s leading greenhouse region, lies Westland, home to Priva’s modern campus in De Lier. This innovative region has been the foundation of our family-owned company since the 1950s.

What started as a hardware business has grown into a global leader in horticulture and building automation. Today, Priva develops advanced hardware, software, and digital services for climate control, energy efficiency, and water optimization. Our solutions support horticulture, indoor and city farming, as well as offices, hotels, hospitals, and retail environments worldwide.

Our next ambition? Becoming a leading digital service provider with “Climate as a Service” solutions that help customers operate more sustainably.

With over 600 colleagues, 16 international offices, and more than 400 installation partners, we deliver smart, sustainable solutions in over 100 countries. If you want your work to have impact on sustainability, food security, and the way cities grow, then this is where you belong.

Why this role matters

At Priva, we are building the next generation of building automation systems: cloud-connected, security-first, and designed for long-term reliability. You will work on an innovative IoT platform that combines embedded controllers, edge gateways, and cloud services to keep buildings running safely for 10–15 years with minimal maintenance.

As a Backend Staff Engineer, you will play a key role in shaping the architecture, reliability, and long-term maintainability of our cloud-connected backend platform.

You will use your deep technical expertise to help us build resilient, observable, and scalable backend solutions. You will guide technical direction, support teams in making sound architectural decisions, and raise the engineering standard across backend development.

This is a senior individual contributor role for someone who loves the challenge of combining hands-on engineering with system-level thinking, technical leadership, and a strong focus on reliability.

Your team

You will join Team Amazey, a team of experienced frontend, backend and QA Engineers, responsible for all cloud services related to Nuro Creator web application. Since the product is nearing launch, it is all hands on board to make this happen: getting features to users, continuous improving SW quality in ways that are helpful for ourselves all whilst maintaining integrity of the users projects when migrations are required.

What you’ll do

• Translate product and system requirements into scalable backend designs

• Lead the design and development of backend services using C# 12 and .NET 8

• Define backend architecture for cloud-connected products

• Review critical technical designs and code, especially in areas that affect reliability, security, scalability, or maintainability

• Design solutions with a focus on high availability, resilience and long-term maintainability

• Guide teams on distributed-system concerns

• Collaborate closely with our internal and external teams including hardware, firmware and QA

• Improve engineering practices around deployment and monitoring

• Support root-cause analysis and drive durable corrective actions after production issues

• Mentor engineers and help raise the technical maturity of the backend engineering organization

• Make pragmatic technical trade-offs between speed, quality, cost, risk, and long-term maintainability.

What you bring

We are looking for an experienced engineer with strong technical leadership capabilities and a system-level mindset. Furthermore, we will look for:

• Extensive experience building backend systems using C# and .NET

• Proven experience designing, building, and operating distributed systems in production

• Practical experience with Akka.NET and actor-based architectures

• Strong understanding of cloud-native architecture on Microsoft Azure

• Experience with event-driven systems, message queues, background processing, and distributed workflows

• Strong knowledge of API design, versioning, authentication, and authorization

• Experience with relational and NoSQL databases such as Azure SQL, PostgreSQL, Cosmos DB, Redis, or similar technologies

• Good understanding of observability, including structured logging, metrics, distributed tracing, alerting and dashboards

• Experience with CI/CD, infrastructure as code, deployment automation, and production operations

• Strong engineering judgment and the ability to simplify complex technical problems

• The ability to influence technical decisions across teams without relying on formal authority

• A strong focus on reliability, maintainability, security, and operational excellence

• Clear communication skills and the ability to explain technical trade-offs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders

• A mentoring mindset and a desire to help other engineers grow

• Strong debugging and problem-solving skills at both code and system level

Nice to have experience with:

• Cloud-connected embedded products, IoT systems, building automation, industrial systems, energy systems, or similar high-reliability environments.

• Azure IoT Hub, Device Provisioning Service, Digital Twins, MQTT, or edge-to-cloud architectures

• Event sourcing, CQRS, domain-driven design, or stateful distributed systems

• Docker or Bicep

• OpenTelemetry, Application Insights, Azure Monitor, or similar observability platforms

• Security-by-design practices, including identity, secrets management, secure communication, and least-privilege access.

• Reliability engineering practices such as failure-mode analysis, chaos testing, operational readiness reviews, and post-incident learning

• Products with long lifecycles, high uptime expectations, and low maintenance requirements

What You Get

In Numbers

• Competitive salary and benefits package for senior engineers

• Flexible working hours and 30 vacation days, with the option to buy more

• 8% holiday allowance

• Travel allowance of €0.23/km (max. 150 km per day)

For Your Well-Being and Growth

• Solid pension plan and participation scheme

• Personal development budget and training opportunities

• Healthy cafeteria

• Free on-site gym with CrossFit, Pilates, Spinning, table tennis, and table football

Our Culture and values

At Priva, our mission is to create environments where people can work, grow, and thrive. We deliver sustainable solutions for horticulture and building automation that reduce resource consumption and contribute to global sustainability goals.

Our culture is built on four core values: Sustainable, Innovative, Make it Happen, and Human.

Colleagues describe Priva as open, ambitious, innovative, friendly, and down-to-earth. We offer a flat, informal, and fast-paced environment where you are encouraged to take ownership and grow.

We believe diversity drives success. We welcome people from all backgrounds and perspectives and create a workplace where everyone feels valued, respected, and empowered to be their authentic self.

Ready to join us?

Talk is cheap, and action gives you confidence. Sound good? Feel free to contact one of our recruiters.